Misha Alperin, born in the Ukraine, grew up in Eastern Moldavia, found his musical direction in Moscow, and is currently based in Oslo. He has consistently turned this geographical isolation from the recognized centres of the jazz "scene" to his advantage, developing a very personal music that views jazz history in the light of his investigations of, for example, the Russian and Romanian folk musics of the Moldavian region and his family's Jewish musical heritage. He considers North Story an 'imaginary reconstruction' of the spirit that fueled Norwegian jazz in the 1970s, that "revolutionary period" when the players of the north were rediscovering their won musical roots. Alperin's writing here binds together Nordic and "ex-Soviet" elements and encourages the Norwegian soloists to tell their own tales, alongside those of the pianist's associate of long-standing, the french horn virtuoso Arkady Shilkloper.